AMO Featured Extensions Policies

Featured add-ons are top-quality extensions and themes highlighted on AMO, Firefox's Add-ons Manager, and across other Mozilla websites. These add-ons showcase the power of Firefox customization and are useful to a wide audience.

Featured extensions are chosen by the Featured Extensions Advisory Board, a small group of extension developers and fans from the Mozilla community who have volunteered to review and vote on nominations.

Most importantly, the extension must have wide consumer appeal to Firefox's users and be outstanding in nearly every way: user experience, performance, security, and usefulness or entertainment value.

Discovery Pane

The Get Add-ons section (also referred to as the Discovery Pane) in about:addons serves a distinct editorial function: it is a tightly curated list of extensions and themes selected by Mozilla staff to address an array of the most common user needs (e.g. ad blockers, screenshot tools, etc.). The Discovery Pane is primarily intended to introduce extensions to Firefox users who have limited experience with browser customization. As such, we only select extensions that meet the highest standards of functionality, user experience, and Firefox compatibility.

Discovery Pane content is updated monthly, though some highly popular extensions may remain on the page for an indefinite period of time.

If you’d like to nominate a great extensions for consideration in the Discovery Pane, please send us a link to the add-on on AMO to amo-featured@mozilla.org and we’ll add your nomination to the editorial review queue. There’s no need to mention you’re nominating add-ons specifically for the Discovery Pane, but feel free to note that if you like.

Nominating an Add-on

If you wish to nominate an extension to be featured and it meets the criteria above, send an email to amo-featured@mozilla.org with:

the extension name, URL, and whether you are its developer

a short explanation of why the extension has wide appeal and should be featured

optionally, links to any external reviews or articles mentioning the extension

Extension nominations are reviewed by the Advisory Board once a month. Common reasons for rejection include lacking wide appeal to consumers, a suboptimal user experience, quality or security issues, incompatibility, and similarity to another featured extension. Rejected extension cannot be re-nominated within 3 months.

Rotating Featured Extensions

Mozilla and the Featured Extensions Advisory Board regularly evaluate and rotate out featured extensions. Some of the most common reasons for extensions being removed from the featured list are:

Lack of growth — Extensions that are featured typically experience a substantial gain in both downloads and active users. If an extension is not demonstrating growth in any substantial way, that's a good indicator the extension may not be very useful to our users.

Negative reviews — Featured extensions should have a great experience and very few bugs, so extensions with many negative reviews may be reconsidered.

Incompatibility with upcoming Firefox versions — Featured extensions are expected to be compatible with stable and beta versions of Firefox. Extensions not yet compatible with a Beta version of Firefox four weeks before its expected release will lose their featured status.

Joining the Featured Extensions Advisory Board

Every six months a new Advisory Board is chosen based on applications from the add-ons community. Members must:

be active members of the add-ons community, whether as a developer, evangelist, or fan

commit to trying all the nominations submitted, giving their feedback, and casting their votes every month

abstain from voting on extensions that they have any business or personal affiliations with, as well as direct competitors of any such extensions

Members of the Mozilla Add-ons team may veto any extension's selection because of security, privacy, compatibility, or any other reason, but in general it is up to the Board to select extensions to feature.

This featured policy only applies to the addons.mozilla.org global list of featured extensions. Extensions featured in other locations are often pulled from this list, but Mozilla may feature any extension in other locations without the Board's consent. Additionally, locale-specific features override the global defaults, so if a locale has opted to select its own features, some or all of the global features may not appear in that locale.